Two tenants allege the city violated their rights when it deemed their living situations unsafe and ordered them to leave without adequate notice.
A judge has denied the City of St. Alban’s request to dismiss a civil suit filed by two tenants who allege the city improperly forced them to leave their homes with minimal notice in 2018.
Tenants Dwight Martell and Lynn Cook lived in units in the same building, which were inspected on Aug. 28, 2018, and found in violation of multiple public health and safety ordinances. The tenants say the next day they were ordered to evacuate the premises immediately after city officials arrived at the property and disconnected the water, gas and power.
The lawsuit, filed last June with the help of Vermont Legal Aid, argues that the city violated the tenants’ Fourth, Fifth and 14th Amendment rights when it failed to give them proper notice of and a chance to respond to the evacuation order, which left them both homeless for months.
While United States Magistrate Judge John Conroy denied the city’s request to dismiss complaints involving the Fourth and 14th Amendment complaints, he dismissed the complaint that the tenants’ Fifth Amendment rights were violated.
The Fourth Amendment protects citizens from “unreasonable searches and seizures” and the 14th Amendment prohibits depriving a person of property “without due process.” The Fifth Amendment also, in part, prohibits the taking of property without due process.
City Manager Dominic Cloud explained that the tenants were removed in response to an emergency situation caused by the poor condition of the building.
“There was raw sewage being discharged into the basement, there was trash overflowing from the unit into the surrounding property, the yard was absolutely filled with trash,” he said in an interview. “On the interior, there were acute code violations a mile long ranging from really technical ones to exposed wiring and no smoke alarms.”
Cloud called the Lincoln Avenue building a “death trap” and said the city is liable if it allows tenants to continue residing in such conditions.
“The landlord failed to meet any public housing code, any human decency code, and he was in foreclosure,” he said. “It was affecting not just the people who lived there but the whole neighborhood.”
According to the city, the landlord, Richard Marchessault of Burlington, “stated there is no intent to rectify any of the aforementioned violations.”
Sandra Paritz, an attorney with Vermont Legal Aid, said the tenants deserved to receive adequate notice from the city about the state of the buildings, and should have been given a chance to respond. She argues that the evacuation was not an emergency since the landlord was given 37 days to remedy the problems.
“The City of St. Albans health inspectors forced low income and vulnerable tenants to immediately vacate their homes, not because there was an emergency, but because the landlord told the inspectors that he would not be making repairs to their building,” she wrote in a statement. “Vulnerable tenants have very little power to enforce the health and safety codes themselves. … They rely on the city to inspect their rental homes and require landlords to make necessary repairs to keep them safely housed.”
Paritz said her clients moved into a motel as part of the state’s “emergency assistance program,” and are suing for damages since they lost belongings and pets due to the move. More significant than the financial loss, she said they experienced the emotional trauma of homelessness.
“They were two families so one of them had a young child who was about to start the school year,” she said in an interview with VTDigger. “There’s nothing more traumatic than finding yourself suddenly homeless, especially if you have kids.”
Cloud said that he feels the city made the right decision in evacuating the premises.
“The city stands by the decision that they needed to get out of that house immediately,” he said.
However, he acknowledged that the city could have done a better job easing the tenants’ transition, and said the city has offered to turn fees from the property into a settlement and pay for moving costs.
“We acknowledged maybe we moved too fast and we could have done more to cushion the blow,” he said. “I feel like we’ve been pretty reasonable with the tenants and Legal Aid.”
He added that the city’s inspection team has instituted a new policy at Vermont Legal Aid’s request that states tenants will be given the same notice as property owners in cases like this one going forward.
Paritz said that this case shows the need for more code enforcement on a broad scale.
“Shouldn’t they be doing code enforcement to get the landlord to fix it instead of making these tenants suddenly homeless?” she said.
Cloud says St. Albans City has high inspection standards and good policies compared to other municipalities in the state. It has two full-time paid inspectors who inspect all rental housing on a four-year cycle. A four-person board meets weekly to review any violations and discuss next steps.
“The irony is that Legal Aid and the city ought to be on the same side for quality housing. Legal Aid decided to try and make an example of St. Albans City but we’re on the front lines of housing inspection across the state,” he said. “In most communities there isn’t anything like this.”
No further hearing dates were set.
